ANYONE PROPOSING the death penalty is either a complete fool, an incorrigible cynic or mentally disturbed – or all of these.

There is no effective therapy for any of these defects. I wouldn't even try.

A fool would not understand the overwhelming evidence for the conclusion. For a cynic, advocacy of the death penalty is a proven votecatcher. A mentally disturbed person derives pleasure from the very thought of an execution. I am not addressing any of these, but ordinary citizens of Israel.

NOBODY DESCRIBED the outbreak of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict better than the historian Isaac Deutscher.

A man lives in a house that catches fire. To save his life, he jumps out of the window. He lands on a passer-by in the street below and injures him grievously. Between the two a bitter enmity arises. Who is to blame?

Of course, no parable can reflect reality exactly. The man who jumped out of the burning house did not land on this particular passer-by by chance. The passer-by became an invalid for life. But on the whole, this parable is better than any other I know.

US President Donald Trump believed he would be able to secure a peace deal between the Palestinians and Israel in less than a year and was surprised by his predecessors' failure to resolve the issue, a Palestinian official involved in talks with the White House has told Turkey's Anadolu news agency.

"At the beginning, the American president was telling us that he was surprised how previous American presidents were unable to solve the conflict and said he would be able to find an agreement within nine months to a year maximum," the unnamed official was quoted as saying, adding that "We told him this is what we want".

Trump has met three times with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since taking office in January 2017, and has made frequent references to an "ultimate deal" which he has said will bring peace to the region.

The US president also formed a team to sketch out a peace plan led by Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, and including Jason Greenblatt, Trump's special representative for international negotiations; David Friedman, the US ambassador in Israel; and Dina Powell, Trump's deputy national security adviser.

Ahed Tamimi, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl, was recently arrested in a night-time raid on her home. The Israeli authorities accuse her of "assaulting" an Israeli soldier and an officer. A day earlier she had confronted Israeli soldiers who had entered her family's backyard. The incident happened shortly after a soldier shot her 14-year-old cousin in the head with a rubber bullet, and fired tear-gas canisters directly at their home, breaking windows.

Her mother and cousin were arrested later as well. All three remain in detention.

There has been a curious lack of support for Ahed from Western feminist groups, human rights advocates and state officials who otherwise present themselves as the purveyors of human rights and champions of girls' empowerment.

"American neo-Nazi demagogue Richard Spencer has again praised Israel as a model for the Aryan homeland he wants to create in the United States. 'The most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state, and it's one I turn to for guidance..."

I AM angry with the Mizrahi elite. Very angry indeed.
Mizrah is the Hebrew word for East. Eastern Jews are those who lived for many centuries in the Islamic world. Western Jews are those who lived in Christian Europe.
The words are, of course, misnomers. Russian Jews are "Westerners", Moroccan Jews are "Easterners". A look at the map shows that Russia is far to the East of Morocco. It would be more accurate to call them "Northerners" and "Southerners". Too late, now.

NO, I don't want to write about the affair of Ya'ir Netanyahu. I refuse adamantly. No force in the world will compel me to do so.

Yet here I am, writing about Ya'ir, damn it. Can't resist.

And perhaps it is really more than a matter of gossip. Perhaps it is something that we cannot ignore.

IT IS all about a conversation between three young man in a car, some two years ago.

One of the young men was Ya'ir, the eldest of the two sons of the Prime Minister.

Ya'ir is named after the leader of the "Stern Gang", whose real name was Abraham Stern. The original Ya'ir split from the Irgun underground in 1940, when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany. While the Irgun stopped its actions against the British government for the time being, Stern demanded the very opposite: exploit the moment in order to get the British out of Palestine. He was shot by the British police.